How was your week, friends? I lunched and coffee-d with friends, fussed with the yard (it is never-ending!!! will the grass grow this year?!) and devotedly wished that the weather would clear up.

I finished everything I need to work through Bank Boost with our new round of students. Class starts on Monday and – not to toot my own horn – but it’s an AWESOME program. People add hundreds and thousands of dollars to their bank accounts, strengthen their self-advocacy muscles, change their relationship with money, NBD. All to the tune of $57. Click here to join us!

Links for you:

It’s been a pretty tough week for current events. Reminder: 5calls.org has call scripts and phone numbers that make contacting your reps super easy.

Ahhhh! A must-read for anyone who’s been dumped and is trying to convince someone to take them back. (We’ve all been there, right?)

You could be absolutely perfect, you could become all the things your former partner specifically said would be exactly right for him, you could find the golden ratio of speaking up and staying silent about all the right things in exactly the right order, you could even send me a list of all your best private jokes and relationship touchstones and I could write you a dazzling, personalized speech that strikes a breathtaking balance between “maintaining a quiet dignity” and “being vulnerable and real…” …and he could still go, or rather, keep going, in the same direction he already went, i.e. already gone.

Somewhat related: The best $5,929.10 I ever spent: moving back to the MidwestOn the subject of apartments: I’m paying $650 a month for a gorgeous studio with a view of the Cedar River and in-unit laundry. I’m the first tenant to occupy this apartment (and the first tenant to use its brand new appliances). Considering that my first Seattle apartment was a converted hotel room with no kitchen and a landlord who advised me to wash my dishes in a bus tub and dump the dishwater into the toilet — WHICH I DID, EVERY DAY — living in this apartment feels like living in another world.

Also: if you’re a stepmom, this is must-read I wish someone had told me about four years ago.

Why is this so cute?! Japanese Ambassador To Sweden Sees Pikachu As His Son“The first time I saw Pikachu, I felt that he was my son,” the tweet from yesterday reads. “When Pokémon Go came out in 2016, Pikachu and the other millions of figures got new friends around the world. Now I will gladly see the Detective Pikachu movie.”

Want to redefine your relationship with money? What luck! That’s exactly what I talked about on this podcast!

Sometime I feel like I’m the only person on the internet who’s not trying to create a multi-million dollar empire that sells self-paced business ecourses and has a team of 15 people. It’s just me and Paul Jarvis. I’m free from financial worry, as it doesn’t take much revenue to be profitable and expenses are quite low. I’m free from the stresses of always being busy or having to hustle constantly, because I know what enough is and don’t have to push myself beyond it. I’m free from the weight of typical “business growth” responsibility—I don’t have to manage others, I don’t have to answer to a board of directors or investors, and I don’t have to be on the hook for high office rent.

I LOVE a cost of living diary, and I’m not trying to add to the negativity out in the world, but I didn’t love the Raleigh profile. I know it’s just a snapshot of one person’s experience, but as someone who also lives in the area, the person interviewed came across as pretty tone deaf. If you haven’t already read this NY Times article, I would highly recommend it as it talks about the complicated relationship between the city and the interviewee’s neighborhood: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/27/upshot/diversity-housing-maps-raleigh-gentrification.html